Category: Stencil Nation

Russell Howze has been enthralled with the street art of San Francisco for decades. He can instantly recognize the work of the city’s most prominent graffiti artists, and knows which Mission District alleys house the most memorable pieces. Howze, a stencil artist himself, maintains a website dedicated to street art, and has written a book on the subject.

As a general rule, graffiti doesn’t pay; Howze is driven by his love of the art form, not by profits. But with the help of a new startup called Vayable, he’s beginning to turn his passion into a career as a tour guide, helping travelers discover the hidden artworks on city buildings and sidewalks. “It’s starting to pay a lot of the bills,” he says. As his reputation grows, he hopes he may be able to turn his street art curator side gig into a full-time job.

Vayable is an online platform that helps travelers find new experiences led by local guides. “The company was born out of my own experiences as a traveler,” says founder and CEO, Jamie Wong. “I love going off the beaten path when I travel, and friends started asking me to create experiences for them to replicate my trips. I built the company to expand beyond my own experiences, and help everyone find that sense of cross-cultural exploration.”

Vayable launched with 70 guides in April 2011, and customers began booking experiences within the first hour of going live. Since then, the company’s been growing at a rate of 30 percent each week.

In San Francisco, Howze’s three-hour street art tour of the Mission District is a top seller; other popular experiences in the region include a sommelier-guided tour of Northern California wineries; a fishing excursion in the San Francisco Bay; and a guided biking tour through the city.

The concept marks a sea change from the traditional tourism industry, which is dominated by large companies that stick to tried-and-true tourist attractions. Vayable is dedicated to giving its users choices in how they want to experience an area, encouraging them to follow their own passions in planning a trip.

Though some guides had been offering professional tours independently prior to working with Vayable, many are new to the field. “Many of our guides are everyday people with access to special knowledge, or a community or space. We’re giving anybody the tools to build and curate an experience out of their interests or passions,” says Wong.

Vayable allows guides to set the prices for their tours, collecting a 15% commission on confirmed bookings. “Many of the guides are supplementing their income in really significant ways,” says Wong. “They love the flexibility. They can have a day job and then follow their passion when they’re not at work and supplement their income through Vayable, to help them pay the bills or afford a trip.”

The company is now offering experiences in over 600 cities on six continents, and growing every day. “With technology, there’s a whole new way to connect,” says Wong. “We’re using these online connections to power offline interactions, and to help travelers and locals alike find meaningful ways to connect with new communities.”

During my 2008/9 Stencil Nation book tour, I set up an event with Matteo Grieder at his art space Zeitvertrieb in Vienna, Austria. Matteo was nervous about the turnout (a common anxiety during my European tour), but I had Pod and Austrian artist Dieter Puntigam backing me up with live VJ and DJing. A nice crowd came for my presentation, bought books, ate and drank, and made a great scene for the event. Matteo was surprised and happy with the results.

A month ago, Matteo approached me with a request for photo submissions to his fun art zine “Artyfucked”. It is mostly a sketch zine, but he also features street art from cities around the world. Issue #8 features my stencil photos (the cream of the crop) from SF. They mostly cover 2011’s greatest hits. He also put them all in an online album.

Company offers quirky tours in San Francisco and beyond

Jamie Wong, the founder and CEO of Vayable, a site that allows people to book and sell local tours ranging from how to be a hipster to living like the homeless for a day, launched her company in April.

What’s the underlying goal of Vayable? Our goal is to enable entrepreneurship and promote cultural understanding, and really provide people with a new way to explore their world. Part of it is being part of this generation who are not following mainstream careers.

Do you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur? I do. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. My passion has always been travel and cultural immersion. I’ve been to more than 30 countries and I speak four languages, but I never had the money to do it because I worked in media and journalism.

Is there one local tour guide who stands out? Russell Howze, who is our guide for Scout for Street Art in S.F. Our team met him on another Vayable tour. He was touring his own family and friends because he was so passionate about it. Then he realized by meeting us that he could monetize this. He works at a nonprofit art gallery in the Mission, and he’s using his [Vayable] money to help restore their murals.

Met up with Ha-Ha last night to catch up and welcome him and the other artists to San Francisco. He happened to have a key to the studio, so took me over to show me the walls. The long hallway entrance to 941 Geary will be covered in street art and graffiti, similar to the famous Hoosier Lane in Melbourne. Ha-Ha said that the coverage was in progress, so expect more layers than these sneak peak photos have. After the tour, I bought Ha-Ha a pint at a local dive bar where the crew has designated their local watering hole. Good to see some of these folks I met around the world in 2008 when I launched my Stencil Nation tour.

This retrospective features the artist’s private family photos, point and shoot images of his graffiti artwork from around the world, and full-color reproductions of his gallery pieces. The book is separated into two distinct sections: “Street Art” and “Fine Art,” both of which are augmented by the writing of celebrated scholars, critics, experts in relevant fields, fellow artists, journalists, collectors and gallerists. Lavishly illustrated with more than 200 images, “Blek le Rat,” the 30 year anniversary retrospective offers the first full history of this seminal artist’s tradition and legacy, featuring:Continue reading “Wrote an Essay for Upcoming Blek le Rat book”

Graffiti Guru Offers Street Art Tours

By Caroline Chenpublished: Tue., Jun. 21 2011 @ 3:00PM

art by Get Up, Upper Haight St.

​No matter how cool you are, there’s still a pretty good chance that the only thing you know about street art is sometimes you come across it, and sometimes it’s amazing. Who did it? What’s behind it? Where can you see more? Who knows?

We do. Or, we know who knows: stencil artist Russell Howze. He’s the author of Stencil Nation, and he offers a three-hour, small-group tour called Scout for Street Art. Howze just started giving these tours two weeks ago, and promises to provide “expert explanations, stories, and background for most of the art that constantly changes on the streets.” And he’s not joking about the “expert” part.

Russell Howze

​Howze has dedicated his life to street art, especially stencils, and he knows a lot about the S.F. street art scene. “I have this particular affinity for San Francisco street art,” Howze says, “especially Mission district — there’s something really special and magical about it.”

Originally from Greenville, S.C., Howze has lived in San Francisco since 1997. Since he saw his first stencil in 1990 in Clemson, S.C., Howze has been photographing the public art in places around the world. In 2002 he created an online stencil archive, which features tens of thousands of photos of stencils. Stencil Nation, published in 2008, is the paperback extension of his site, documenting 350 artists in 28 countries.

Howze does not have a fixed schedule for his tour — you can just sign up by yourself or in a group ($37) per person and state your preferred times. The tour is run through Vayable, a company that draws on locals to give their own tours. Anyone can sign up to offer a tour, and Vayable acts as the conduit, handling bookings and payments. Vayable operates worldwide, and as one might expect, it offers numerous S.F. tours, including horseback riding on Ocean Beach, a used bookstore crawl, and a potentially perilous “Whiskey on Wheels” tour.

Vayable hosts a mixer called “A Vayable Idea” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Galeria de la Raza, where Howze will start the night with a 10-minute talk, “The Present Future of Street Art.” The event is free, but you can register here.

For well over 10 years now, I have been documenting stencils on Bruce Tomb’s wall on Valencia Street (If you search the Archives for "DAP" they will appear). I have also put art up there and enjoyed all the other art that I do not document. Tomb may not confess to actually owning this wall, because over the years it has become a wall of Free Speech for many artists, neighbors, and organizations. Some call it the Democracy Wall, but Tomb named it the (de)Appropriation Wall, especially since he resides in a former SF Police Department building. The building had a literally tortured past (Chicanos and Latinos were treated poorly by the mostly Irish police in the last century), and a bomb was placed at its back door during the violent era of radical factions in the Bay Area. Tomb decided to use the facade of this building as a force of freedom, more specifically of speech.

Tomb had a brief tussle with the City authorities over his free access to whomever wants to get up on this wall. When the City realized that it could potentially be a Constitutional matter, they backed down. The DAP wall shows up in my book "Stencil Nation" about half a dozen times. He has written about it in the book "Mission Muralismo," where it was featured. Before the book came out, some of the contributors had a show at ATA. I showed a slide presentation of Mission District stencils. Tomb showed the following video of the photographs he has taken over the years. I believe he stands in the same exact place about once a week and snaps a photo of the wall. Being a historian and documentor, I asked him to post this video for others to enjoy and analyze. For a reference of time, notice how the tree grows in front of the wall!

“Russell Howze is a native Greenvillian and a stencil artist. He runs the Stencil Archive and published the collection Stencil Nation: Community, Graffiti, and Art in 2008, documenting the work of over 350 artists from 28 countries. The Stencil Nation Book Tour will stop by the Warehouse Theatre Monday, December 20 at 7 PM.”

Check out the rest of the Create Greenville interview here. FaceBook invitation and info found here.